Tag Archives: Times of Israel

Coming after terrorists launched rockets into Israel late last week and Israel retaliated, Monday, IDF soldiers prevented an attack at Israel’s border with Gaza. The Times of Israel reported:

The soldiers spotted two suspects carrying a suspicious object near the fence, and chased them away by firing warning shots, according to a statement from the army. As they fled, the suspects dropped the object, which exploded moments later.

Soldiers guarding Israel’s border with Hamas ruled Gaza are regularly under threat from snipers as well as improvised, explosive devices (IED’s).

Monday’s incident at the Gaza border came on the heels of cross border attacks during the past week. Thursday and Friday last week, terrorists fired 5 rockets into Israel. The IDF retaliated hitting five sites inside Gaza.

IDF spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said:

“The retaliation this evening at Gaza terrorist aggression was precision, and intelligence based. It is our obligation to seek out those that wish to attack us, eliminate their capabilities and pursue them wherever they hide. Hamas rocket terrorism is an intolerable reality Israelis should not have to accept.”

Four Hamas members were reported injured.

Last month Israel intercepted an Iranian sponsored arms shipment heading to Gaza. The rockets intercepted suggested that Hamas was trying replenish its arsenal that had been degraded during 2012′s Operation Pillar of Defense.

The weapons depots constituted the Islamist group’s logistic rear front, and the Egyptians reportedly also shut down arms workshops in Sheikh Zuweid which produced arms for Hamas.

Near those workshops, Hamas also operated firing ranges for testing rockets in the months before the Egyptian campaign, the officials said.

According to the Israeli sources, before the Egyptian revolution in 2011, whole sections of Sheikh Zuweid were considered extraterritorial for the Egyptian military, and Hamas therefore decided to locate its warehouses, test ranges and workshops there. Being in Egyptian territory, they would also be impervious from Israeli attack. The Israelis noted that the workshops were not large in scale and only a small portion of Hamas’s arms were produced there.

Egyptian security officials confirmed that there were storehouses in Shiekh Zuweid containing arms destined for Hamas, but they denied the presence of any workshops.

Bedouin tribes in the northern Sinai recently surrendered a stockpile of dozens of anti-tank missiles to the Egyptian authorities.

Relations between Hamas and Cairo broke down in recent months following the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist president Mohammed Morsi by the military.

Egypt even referred to Hamas in the charge sheet against Morsi as a “terror organization.” Meanwhile, amid sour relations between Cairo and Gaza, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said that the Islamist terror group had renewed its relations with Tehran, in part due to the change in government there.